Heretofore, reagents for and methods of quickly and accurately detecting the causative organisms of infectious diseases in analytes have been proposed. For instance, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H08-89254 discloses oligonucleotides having specific base sequences, which can be respectively used as probes and primers for detecting pathogenic bacteria of candidiasis and aspergillosis, and a method of detecting target bacteria using such oligonucleotides. In addition, the same patent document also discloses a set of primers used for concurrently amplifying a plurality of target bacteria by PCR. In other words, those primers are used for the PCR amplification of nucleic acid fragments from fungi, which serve as a plurality of targets, in an analyte. The presence or absence of sequence portions, which are specific to the respective fungi, in the nucleic acid fragments amplified by the respective primers can be detected by a hybridization assay using probes specific to the respective fungi to identify fungal species in the analyte.
On the other hand, as a method capable of simultaneously detecting a plurality of oligonucleotides having different base sequences, there has been known a method using a probe array in which probes having sequences complementary to the respective base sequences are arranged at intervals on a solid support (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-313181).